‘Tamla Motown is an American record company born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1958. Its peculiarity was — in times when the US record market was strictly divided between the great white multinationals and the “Race Records”, for the exclusive consumption of black people– to become the first coloured record company aiming to compete in the same market as the whites, but with a genuinely Afro-American product. The inventor of this project, which started in a Detroit area called Motor Town (hence Motown) because of the presence of Ford plants, was Berry Gordy, ex-record shop keeper, boxer, worker at Ford’s car production plants, composer and record producer. Motown became a world-wide synonym for success, thanks to a number of artists as Smokey Robinson, the Miracles, the Temptations, the Four Tops, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, the Commodores (including Lionel Ritchie), the Jackson Five and many more. The exhibition, organised in collaboration with Ricordi and thanks to the video consultancy by Alberto Contri, narrates an adventure of Afro-American independence, within the intricate record business world.’